Sunday, February 16, 2014

The genetic sequence from a prehistoric baby in a 12,000-year-old
Clovis burial site in Montana is providing significant data on the origins of
the earliest Americans. Until now, archaeologists have had to rely mainly on tools
made of stone and bone, and other artifacts to tell the story of human
migration about 15,000 years ago to the New World.

Now that story is bolstered with some dramatic, ancient
DNA, extracted from the remains of a 1-year-old boy who died in what is now Montana
more than 12,000 years ago, according to a study described in Nature magazine.

"Clovis is what we like to refer to as an
'archaeological complex,' " says Michael
Waters, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University.

That complex is
defined by characteristic tools, he says.

The Clovis artifacts were common for about 400 years,
starting about 13,000 years ago. But at this point, there is only one set of
human remains associated with those sorts of tools: that of the baby from
Montana. "So this genetic study actually provides us with a
look at who these people were," Waters says.

The most obvious conclusion from the study is that the
Clovis people who lived on the Anzick site in Montana were genetically
very much like Native Americans throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Saturday, January 25, 2014

After examining a 3,700-year-old
clay tablet with instructions on how to build an ark, the expert who translated
it says he doubts Noah’s Ark ever existed.

The ark instructions call for
construction of a huge circular coracle, 3,600 square meters large and made
like a giant rope basket strengthened with wooden ribs, waterproofed with
bitumen inside and out. What’s described is a giant version of a craft the
Babylonians knew very well, in daily use up to the late 20th century to
transport people and animals across rivers, according to British Museum expert
Irving Finkel.

According to the Guardian: "I
am 107% convinced the ark never existed," Finkel said.The tablet gives a version of
the ark story far older than the biblical accounts, and Finkel believes the
explanation of how "holy writ appears on this piece of Weetabix," is
that the writers of the Bible drew on ancient accounts encountered by Hebrew
scholars during the Babylonian exile.Texts about a great flood and
the order by God to the one just man to build a boat and save himself, his
family, and all the animals, clearly older than the Bible story, were first
found in the Middle East in the 19th century. They caused both consternation
and wild excitement, including an expedition to find the broken part of one
tablet in a mountain of shattered clay fragments.

The tablet was brought to Finkel
on a museum open day by Douglas Simmons, whose father, Leonard, brought it back
to England in a tea-chest full of curios, after wartime service in the Middle
East with the RAF.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Another
cave containing prehistoric paintings may exist just four kilometers from the
famous Lascaux caves in southwestern France. The original cave art at Lascaux
was found in 1940, and attracted hordes of visitors until it was closed to the
public in 1983 to protect the artwork.

A group of teenagers near the town of Montignac discovered in 1940 a complex
network of Paleolithic caves with a series of 17,000-year-old frescos. According
to Archaeology News Network:

The
rumors of a second cave covered in pre-historic artwork have been circulating
for years, but it appears local authorities are now ready to take them
seriously after one local family shared an extraordinary secret they had kept
to themselves for half a century.

According to French media reports this week,
preliminary investigations by the town’s mayor, as well as authorities in the
Dordogne region, have proved promising enough to warrant a more detailed probe
into a patch of land 4 km from the site of the Lascaux caves.

“There’s
no certainty, and we are still quite far from having the necessary evidence to
confirm the existence of another decorated cave,” Montignac mayor Laurent
Mathieu told French daily Le Figaro this week.

Despite
that caution, however, Mathieu did confirm that the culture department of the
Dordogne regional administration would soon be mapping out a 10-hectare area
for “further research.” This region will also be placed under surveillance, to
prevent amateur archaeologists from conducting their own, unsupervised
investigations.

The
possibility of a second discovery near the town came about in August, when an
elderly local woman told the mayor that her husband – who had died in August – had
come across a cave with prehistoric frescos back in 1962, but had covered the
entrance for fear of bringing hassle on himself. The secret had stayed in the family for 51 years, until she finally
shared it with the mayor.

Image: Researcher examining paintings in the original Lascaux chamber.

Tides represent the high and low, the ebb and flow. They're the rhythm spanning millennia and an apt image for this blog as it seeks to provide accounts linking today with ages long past. New archaeological finds and scholarly speculations help us better understand our ancestors and this small planet we've shared. And the better we understand our forebears and their environs, the better we know ourselves.

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